


The Prince and His Manservant's Magical Healing Cock

by MontanaHarper



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Bawdy Stories, Community: kinkme_merlin, M/M, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-13
Updated: 2009-05-13
Packaged: 2017-10-02 09:20:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MontanaHarper/pseuds/MontanaHarper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>As the evening drew on and the feast was served and cleared away course by course, the tales of the travelling storyteller became more and more bawdy.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Prince and His Manservant's Magical Healing Cock

**Author's Note:**

> The first two bawdy stories told by Theodric are totally filched from [_Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18575) ("[The Search for the Ring](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18575/18575-h/p1.htm#2H_4_0005)" and "[The Husband Pandar to His Own Wife](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18575/18575-h/p1.htm#2H_4_0011)").
> 
> For the [](http://community.livejournal.com/kinkme_merlin/profile?mode=fullprofile)[**kinkme_merlin**](http://community.livejournal.com/kinkme_merlin) prompt: a bard comes to Camelot with somewhat bawdy romance stories; Merlin likes them, which Arthur teases him for, until they hear the one about the prince and his manservant.
> 
> I cannot possibly thank [](http://casspeach.dreamwdith.org/profile?mode=fullprofile)[**casspeach**](http://casspeach.dreamwidth.org/) enough. She Britpicks, cheerleads, holds my hand, and just is basically my lifeline when I'm writing. Thanks also to [](http://verhalten.dreamwdith.org/profile?mode=fullprofile)[**verhalten**](http://verhalten.dreamwidth.org/) for reading it over and reassuring me that it made sense.

As the evening drew on and the feast was served and cleared away course by course, the tales of the travelling storyteller became more and more bawdy. What began with stories of battle and chivalry soon moved on to cautionary tales of sorceresses disguised as helpless old women, and once all the noblewomen – barring Morgana, of course, who had never been one to do what was expected of those of her gender – had retired for the evening, Theodric began to spin yarns of an entirely different sort.

The few remaining knights and noblemen had gathered on benches dragged in a semi-circle around where Theodric sat beside the hearth. A handful of servants stood nearby to refill their cups with wine, but Merlin being Merlin had sat down on the bench beside Arthur as though he were an equal, and entitled to a position at Arthur's right hand. Arthur merely rolled his eyes fondly at his manservant's presumptuousness and elbowed Merlin occasionally when his empty cup went unnoticed for too long.

As Theodric began the tale of a very un-chivalrous knight with designs on the wife of his neighbour, Arthur found his attention straying to Merlin more often than was probably appropriate. It was, he told himself, merely Merlin's laughter that drew his notice; perhaps if he drank enough wine, he might even make himself believe it.

The tale continued, the knight having his way with the miller's wife under the pretence of doing her the good deed of re-affixing her loose cunt lest it fall off entirely and she proudly recounting the details to her newly returned husband, insisting that they owed the knight a great debt for his efforts on her behalf. "'Indeed,' the miller agreed, 'I owe him greatly, and I will be sure to repay him in kind.'" Theodric paused as the words were greeted by shouts of knowing laughter from his audience. "And repay he did, for soon the knight was called away and the miller contrived to visit his neighbour's home and speak to his neighbour's wife while she was alone in her bath."

Arthur nudged Merlin's arm and handed his empty cup over to be filled while Theodric told of the purloined ring and the lady's frantic search for it, of the miller's suggestion that she'd lost the ring inside herself after dropping it in the bath, and of his offer to help her retrieve it once again. Personally, Arthur thought it much more likely that any ring found _there_ would not be hers but would belong to her husband – or perhaps to some random stranger, if she were truly so naive as to allow men to rummage her body as though it were a jewellery chest. He said as much to Merlin, who looked at him with a wide-eyed expression somewhere between amusement and shock, and then shook his head before returning Arthur's now-full cup and pointedly turning his attention back to Theodric.

Of course the knight's wife, like the miller's wife before her, detailed her adventures upon her husband's return. She lauded the miller for his generous assistance, and her husband could do nothing but agree that indeed the miller had been very kind to her.

"The knight and the miller," Theodric went on, "met on the road soon after, the miller hailing the knight as Cunt Affixer and the knight greeting the miller with the title of Ring Finder. They soon agreed, as each had got the better of the other, that they would not speak of the incidents again, and they never did."

Merlin's cheeks were flushed, whether from the occasional sip of wine that Arthur had caught him sneaking throughout the evening or from the recounting of the miller's retaliatory acts against the knight by way of the knight's own wife, and Arthur gave in to the urge to bump his shoulder lightly against Merlin's. "There's a job for you," he said softly, the words intended for Merlin's ear alone. "Next time I sack you for being a useless manservant, you can seek employment as a finder of lost objects. Surely even you could do well at that."

He smirked at Merlin's resultant embarrassment, which only served to intensify both Merlin's blush and his own amusement.

Theodric's next tale was of a nobleman with designs on his wife's maidservant – Arthur was beginning to see a pattern here – who pursued the poor girl until she confessed all to her mistress. Together they formed a plan that sounded to Arthur far too like something Morgana would come up with, the girl being instructed to agree to an assignation with her mistress' husband and her mistress planning to take her place.

When, upon the evening of the planned assignation, a visitor arrived in the form of a knight who was a great friend to the nobleman, Arthur could see any of a dozen different ways the wife's plan could go awry, and when the knight began to inquire after local courtesans, Merlin leaned close to Arthur and whispered, "This can't end well."

Arthur laughed. "For whom?" he whispered back. Merlin didn't answer, but remained – unexpectedly yet also pleasantly – pressed against him from shoulder to hip to knee.

Of course Merlin was right and it didn't end well, the man discovering in the morning that it was his own wife both he and the knight had had their way with; in his desperation to bed his wife's maidservant he'd managed only to cuckold himself.

"I feel worst for the wife," Arthur confided to Merlin with as straight a face as he could manage. "With no idea it had been two separate men in her bed, I'm sure she was left with unreasonable expectations for her husband's future performance. No doubt she was disappointed when he managed to mount her a mere half-dozen times the following night."

Once again Merlin looked somewhere between scandalized and entertained, and that left Arthur feeling more than a little pleased with himself. He finished off the wine in his cup and passed it to Merlin again, ignoring the raised eyebrow Merlin must've learnt from Gaius and holding his hand out patiently until Merlin finally refilled the cup and passed it back.

"Once there was a young and handsome prince," Theodric began, "who had in his employ an equally young and handsome manservant."

Arthur stopped, cup halfway to his mouth, and he felt Merlin stiffen at his side. At Theodric's side, Morgana looked calm and regal and every inch the king's ward, her conduct above reproach. It was, Arthur knew, a very clever façade, meant to hide the fact that she was nothing less than pure evil in an admittedly stunning package. He braced himself, pasted a benign smile on his face, and finished raising the cup to his lips.

Theodric had apparently not even noticed the rise in tension in the room, as he had continued without pause: "The prince thought of nothing but honor and glory and battle, while the manservant thought only of the prince, of his golden hair and comely form and winsome smile.

"Every day the servant performed his duties without so much as a word of complaint, no matter what his master asked of him. Each morning he brought a breakfast tray filled with the prince's favorite foods and each night he undressed the prince and saw him safely to bed. In between times he polished armour and laundered clothes and mucked stables."

The room was quieter than before, and even without catching them at it, Arthur knew the various knights and nobles and even servants were glancing surreptitiously at him and Merlin. For his part, Merlin was completely still, though out of the corner of his eye Arthur could see long, slender fingers wrapped, white-knuckled around the handle of the wine jug.

Arthur dragged his attention away from Merlin's hands and back to what Theodric was saying.

"– until one day the manservant could bear it no longer. The prince had spent long hours on the cold, rainy practice field with his knights, and when he retired to his rooms for the evening his voice was rough from shouting orders."

Taking another drink of his wine, Arthur listened as Theodric told of the manservant's offer of a healing salve for the prince's throat. The prince, of course, was the innocent of the story, portrayed as no less naive than the wives of the miller and the knight had been in their turn, and Arthur tamped down the urge to object. It was simply another bawdy tale, and Arthur could not be seen to react as though it were otherwise, not even when, at the prince's acquiesence, the manservant began applying the "healing salve" to the back of his master's throat with his instrument.

And so he laughed at the appropriate moments, smiled as though the story were as amusing as the ones previous, and absolutely did not think of himself and Merlin in place of the prince and his manservant.

It would have been too easy, though, too _kind_ for the tale to have ended there.

Instead, the prince began to extol his manservant's virtues to one of his knights – a man who was apparently the prince's closest confidant and whose description sounded to Arthur suspiciously like that of Lancelot – praising the boy's dedication and opining that there was no better servant in the whole of the kingdom. When the prince recounted the tale of his sore throat, and of his manservant's miraculous cure, Arthur couldn't help but wonder why the people in stories couldn't keep their bloody mouths shut.

And when knight mentioned in turn that he had heard the young manservant complain of being saddle-sore after the day's hunting, and then suggested that it would be a fair repayment for his servant's dedication if the prince were to administer some healing salve of his own to the boy's backside, Arthur couldn't react at all because beside him Merlin had completely stopped breathing.

Truly, Arthur didn't remember how they made it through the rest of Theodric's tale. He knew he'd taken the jug of wine from Merlin and refilled his own cup, more because he was afraid Merlin would drop it to the floor and attract even more attention with the sound of shattering crockery than because he actually wanted any wine. He knew, too, that he had smiled at Theodric and thanked him graciously for the evening's entertainment, had smiled at Morgana and offered to escort her to her rooms – an offer she had wisely declined – and had smiled at Merlin and ordered him to see to the fire in Arthur's chambers.

Arthur walked slowly, hoping that Merlin would have taken care of the fire, lit the candles, and laid out Arthur's night clothes by the time he reached his rooms. The sooner he could dismiss Merlin for the night, the sooner he would be free of the awkward, stifling feeling that had been pressing in upon him since he realised the nature of Theodric's final tale.

And indeed, when he arrived he found everything ready for him to retire, all of it done in what he suspected was record time. He stepped into the room and walked straight past Merlin to stand facing the fire; he was fairly certain that the less time they spent together, the more quickly things would return to normal. Not that Arthur exactly wanted to return to the relationship they'd had before, but it was infinitely preferable to the uncomfortable silence currently stretching between them.

Behind him, Merlin cleared his throat. "Is there anything else, Sire?"

"No, I think –"

"Only, you sound a bit hoarse."

Arthur's heart beat faster at the words, and he turned around slowly, not quite willing to believe Merlin meant what Arthur thought he'd meant. Merlin's gaze was on the floor and his hands were clasped in front of himself, obscuring Arthur's view of the front of his trousers. He looked close to terrified, as though he expected Arthur to have him flogged for his impudence. Still, he stood his ground as Arthur approached, Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed, and when Arthur finally stopped before him, Merlin's gaze slowly climbed his body, pausing to take in his obvious state of arousal before finally meeting his eyes with a look as heated as the fire at his back.

"I think," Arthur said softly, something akin to relief or possibly happiness making him light-headed, "I think perhaps I am."


End file.
